The legal paperwork has been done. Sen. Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa is now officially a fugitive.
We are getting the usual spiels. Police tracker teams have been formed. Law enforcement has “good leads” on where he might be found. But no one tells us when an arrest might happen.
The search for Bato might be an exasperating exercise. Government’s record for tracking down and hauling in high profile fugitives is not very impressive. Remember how Sen. Panfilo Lacson hid out for a very long time, surfacing only after his lawyers managed to clear his case.
The police has been trying to arrest several other high profile persons for months. Atong Ang, accused of masterminding the disappearance of several individuals linked to illegal gambling, is out there somewhere. Lately, his lawyers have been accused of trying to bribe the families of the disappeared.
The former head of the National Penitentiary, accused of masterminding the murder of a radio broadcaster, has been the subject of a manhunt for years. So is a ranking police officer linked to criminal activities.
We now know where Zaldy Co is. He is in his luxury apartment in Paris, out of the reach of Philippine law enforcement. He applied for sanctuary in France and that protects him from arrest. Too, there are enough powerful personalities interested in keeping him away instead of having him return to spill all the beans.
Getting Bato is particularly challenging. He once headed the Philippine National Police and remains respected by his former subordinates. They believe the war on drugs which he led saved the country from becoming a narco-state. Prior to the drama that happened in the Senate last week, he managed to elude the police for many months.
Bato is not an imminent threat to the country’s stability and security. He failed to make himself a rallying point for those disillusioned with the weak governance we have had.
If he had a little more imagination and was a little more articulate, Bato might have couched his situation in more elaborate political terms, providing a counter-narrative to the official one. He might have tried to package himself as some sort of law enforcement hero – one who courageously battled powerful crime syndicates positioned to overwhelm the nation.
There is enough material for building such a counter-narrative. The drug syndicates, particularly, had amassed enough wealth to buy off our politicians and our courts. The social costs of widespread drug addiction was immense. After the drug war commenced, there was evident improvement in the peace and order situation.
The drug war might have been conducted with less impunity and less brutality. But it was, after all, a war. The growing power of the drug syndicates threatened the integrity of the state. The power struggle between competing syndicates produced enough violence on its own.
Bato could have positioned himself as a force for law and order. No one has stepped into that role. Because no one did, the narrative preferred by human rights advocates now enjoys hegemony.
Because he failed to clothe his role in broader terms as an advocate for law and order out to save the Republic, Bato failed to pose a sustainable counter-narrative. He could have argued that, despite its murderous excesses, the drug war needed to be waged. Had it not been waged, the country would be in even direr straits than it is now.
There is a significant constituency in the law enforcement community for such a counter-narrative. But no one mustered the courage to champion it against the bleeding heart liberals.
Because he did not step up and weave a counter-narrative, it is now easy to picture Bato as a plain fugitive running away from his accountability. He is a fugitive protecting his own comforts and nothing much else. It is now harder to build a constituency around the counter-narrative that the nation prevails because the mighty drug syndicates were broken by courageous police officers like Bato.
Because he failed to build his counter-narrative, it is now so easy to vilify Bato. To make him the subject of cruel memes. To caricature him as a bumbling and inarticulate politician distinguished only by his fierce loyalty to the former president.
Bato, in fact, was an exemplary police officer. His professional record stands. No one ever accused him of self-aggrandizement. But a war, once declared, is carried by its own momentum. Bato could not fully control the momentum that the war on drugs generated.
History will probably be kinder to Bato. But at the moment, he has been reduced simply to the caricature painted of him.
He became a politician without the political skills the job requires. He now faces charges not because the war on drugs failed but because it was conducted too harshly.
If he were a little more articulate, he might have argued the war on drugs was a necessity. The public instinctively knew it was. The streets are immensely safer because of that campaign.
Instead of being celebrated a hero, however, Bato is now the picture of pathos. He could not command the circumstances and events have not turned in his favor.
The mob needs a sacrificial lamb to atone for the excesses of the anti-drug campaign. Bato has made it convenient for the mob to blame him.
The campaign he led is unappreciated.